Art can often imitate life, Touch Your Fear fulfils this axiom admirably. This album charts a painful path, one of mental and physical anguish.
Music for dark clubs and sadly, dark times
The world was a very different place when I last wrote about Roberto Auser’s music. In 2019 he released Chaos Never Ends on Madrid’s Femur, a caustic mini-LP of industrial intent. An unbelievable number of things have taken place since then; the pandemic, war (new and ongoing) and the growth of Strongman politics and the decline of democracy. Trying to make sense of all this, Auser returns with a new album to soundtrack to chart this change.
A glum marching beat introduces “Nightfall.” Painful percussion is laced with blackened overtones with the tone of the record being set. Terse beats give way to an off-kilter melody in “Open Sky.” The mechanical chatter and clatter of machines are central to the record, the incessant churn of chains and gears being the rhythmic base. From this oil-stained foundation, grisly grinding grooves take form. Take the “Fortresses,” with its bludgeoning EBM hammer and stomp that is guaranteed to inflict damage on a floor, or the understated menace of the title piece; tracks lock the listener with their bitter-sweet melodies. Auser toys with voice in the electro gloom of “Shining” and the tilting uncertainty of “Insecticide.” At times the record, with its ashen aspect, can become too much. The darkness breaks, just for a moment, with the less than cheerfully titled “Unscarred.” Playful notes and keyboard stabs are kept in check by a skeletal snare with cheeky shifts producing a welcome effect. That chink of brightness is quickly snuffed out, the finale coming in the form of the creeping cinematic elegy of “Seven.”
Art can often imitate life, Touch Your Fear fulfils this axiom admirably. This album charts a painful path, one of mental and physical anguish. There are moments of reprieve, but they are few and far between. Music for dark clubs and sadly, dark times.
Touch Your Fear is available on Lunatic. [Bandcamp]
